Both of these readings really delve into the actual experience of sound in not only the physical world, but in the mental. Brewster's writing I found to be more translatable to my practice of sculpture, commenting on the union of sound and the practice of 'sculpture' as itself. "Sculpture should be a category of EXPERIENCE, not just a category of physical objects for us to stand back and behold." I find this extremely interesting considering I've been grappling with that concept myself; I personally don't like the practice of making objects or artifacts, but rather want to push the audience into a completely different area of existence through an environment. Sound is only one facet that can help me envelop the viewer, turn them into something less-distanced, and more involved.
McLuhan's article discussed the interesting development of the senses in different cultures over time, calling to attention the favoring of sight over anything else. Sight seems to place us at a distance of the world around us, casting us as viewers instead of actual players. Sound has the power to break that barrier, having no boundaries in space but rather all-encompassing the body. Albeit McLuhan believes that modern Americans have produced sight over-stimulation, I believe that we are fast transgressing into that of both sight and sound overload, with music becoming such an accessible and central commodity to most lives. It keeps the brain occupied through constant auditory stimulation, relieving the need to mentally focus on thoughts or other senses while in silence. While more ways of creating experience through the senses are being developed, I'm not sure if 'over-stimulation' of any one sense is necessarily a bad thing; it should be up to the individual how they want to experience when given the option. But I agree that sound is something that should be given more credit when moving through the world; it creates such a different bend on an experience when all facets of the environment are taken into consideration.
As talked about in a previous article, advancement does not instantly equal “good.” In the case of CD players, for example, the more “advanced,” technologically modern products made sound manipulation more difficult and therefore became less valuable to sound artists. What I find fascinating, however, is that the disadvantages of modern products do not end there; in fact, they continue on to us. McLuhan concluded that modern society disadvantaged “hearers” of today due to the fact that they are so trained to pick up visual, and only visual, cues. To me, this makes great sense as I often find myself struggling to hear and find art in noise. It is something that an individual needs to retrain back into him or herself after an upbringing in which society has trained it out. --Tiffany
I don't know how much I agree with the statement on page 102, where it claims that "it is difficult to see a sculpture fully" with the reasoning behind this statement being that "it's always a bunch of sequenced frontalizations." I believe that a good sculpture addresses something which penetrates the brain in places which are not categorized by "seeing" or "hearing," specifically. The conceptual integrity of a sculpture, no matter which form it takes, becomes something that can only be recognized by the viewer. It is the intangible affect on the viewer, based on past memories or ideas or visions specific to that person's personal historical knowledge that must be addressed and stimulated; things must be decided and described only within the mind of one person. There are things that a purely visual sculpture can address that a sound piece would never be able to convey or affects that could never be felt without the contextual physical representation of the idea. Even the same idea or emotive reaction is desired, there is a specific need for which medium is chosen. Within this aspect, there lies another embedded and unappreciated art. I completely disagree with the notion that sculptures are "just a category of physical objects for us to just stand back and behold." This may be true for objects or daily crap that we experience, but the same can be said about background noise. I feel that you can experience a physical representation of a sculpture in a different, but just as strong/heavy/emotive/experiential manner as with a sound piece. Again, in the third paragraph on page 102, I see the author discrediting the power and importance of the viewers inner reaction. It all goes along with what I just said about personal memories contributing and essentially making up the entire sculpture. When considering a "seen" sculpture, the immediacy and importance of the conceptual intentions are not directly penetrating and stimulating your brain as with soundwaves--I acknowledge that at times a sound piece can feel as if it were coming from WITHIN your own brain and being permanently contained there forever--but it can do something that is powerful based on the movement/flow/STUN and HALT of the thought-process; acknowledging subconscious feelings or bringing forth dissimilar and unintended connections that each person will experience differently. The desire to "wrap [the experience] around the viewer" is understandable, but what about the restrictions that a sound piece then brings up? Headphones only have so long of a cord, losing that restriction lends itself to interference from shuffling of unintended noises or not experiencing the reverberation or intensity of the piece if using speakers, etc. Brewster seems to be making points that are generalizing "seen" sculptures as being incompetent and "heard" sculptures as being the flawless way to experience a sculpture. I, personally, believe that a sound piece can hold my attention for nowhere near as much time as I could tolerate breathing in water. When I am forced to analyze or critique or explore a given track, I do so, but I don't look back on it in the same way I do with a pictorial, stored image of a "seen" sculpture. Along with each image that falls easily into the way in which my brain deals with categorization comes my thought process and memories of blips of thoughts/concepts/previous memories/sensations/all of it. With a sound piece, it may penetrate closer to the mind, but it seems to have no importance past that into the filing and long-term memory section for re-visiting and connecting it to bigger things. When he says that sound is "a spacious thing that you can inhabit," I found myself shaking my head. I see sound as inhabiting YOU. Within your brain, reacting to your ears. It is an intangible and impenetrable sensation at its best. Steph Hedges
Thinking in the way McLuhan presents it, sound is "rarely limited by the density of physical objects." This is an intense notion that is a supporting fact to his previous statement; the acknowledging that "if our eardrums were tuned any higher we would hear molecules colliding in the air and the roaring rush of our own blood." These concepts are so unimaginable just because we have accepted what we can and cannot hear. The way McLuhan analyzes the dependency on the brain to analyze what the eye can see it actually a factual support as to what Brewster was talking about. I still don't buy it, though. Yes, I understand and respect Mc's description of how the middleground gets lost and the boundaries of seeing are fixed, I just don't see it as an inferior means of conveying the same deep-down feeling of things that acoustic space can occupy/achieve. It's also interesting to think about humans only being capable of auditory sensations (before the construction of words and numbers).
ALSO, I'm in the sound development room at the Tech Center and there are 4 other people in here, all music majors, I assume, because they're tapping on the table and recording music using the keyboards with headphones in, but to me it just sounds like the tap/bang/click of the plastic keys slamming back into place. It's driving me insane and making my heart rush. I've been focusing on them as my internalized understandings of the intentional aspects surrounding emotive reactions to sounds. So instead of being pissed and perturbed by these jerks, I'm thinking about how the conceptual aspects of sound art translate into daily life. I see the connection between what these artists are consciously point out as a piece of artwork and what someone unknowingly emits into the realm of sound, left to be ignored or interpreted by anyone blessed/cursed to be within earshot of the soundwaves that have been created. Almost everything we do becomes noise pollution and it ignites some sort of sensation to those around us who hear it; whether it's consciously analyzed like I'm doing right now or it slips into our subconscious and we don't recognize the fact that we recognize it, but some part of us does. It then formulates memories and connotative reactions specific to one person only and stores them away for the next thing that only that one person would ever be capable of relating to a completely unrelated ideas or sounds or imagery, what-have-you. Steph Hedges.
"Sculpture should be a category of experience" - YES. I think I love this article. I agree that sculpture is the perfect medium in which to use sound as art. Sound is the only thing that I can think of that can exist as an object without actually being there. There is so much dimension and personality to sound that it is easy to personify and apply emotion to sound. By using sculpture as the vessel for sound art, we are simply giving an actual body to an otherwise bodiless entity. I agree that sound helps to close the gap between the "perceived and perceiver". It bridges the gap between something we can feel and something we can see.
I thought it was interesting that in McLuhan's essay, he speaks (or writes, I guess I should make that distiction) of the effects of written language but his points on sound focus on hearing rather than the foibles of spoken language (intonation, affect, etc.) I supposed that's touched on a bit in the mentioning of Goebbels' loudspeakers (a commanding live presence wins followers in a way that a book or article couldn't). There's also a lot of discussion in the article about how people use their own language, such as the distiction McLuhan makes between Westerners and the Trobrianders conceptions of time. These are all interesting, but I would like to hear (or read..or hear...damn) some thoughts on the differences between written and spoken works.
The view of vision being a limiting sense expressed in both of these articles is one that I too have found to be true of life and the arts. (I have cited it as being one of the reasons that I chose sculpture as my preferred medium). I grew up in a house where we were encouraged to use all of our other senses as much as sight. My dad and I have hyper-sensitive olfactory gifts, and it was way more common growing up to talk about subtle sounds or smells than it was to say: Hey! Did you see that? Lets investigate!. It was hey did you smell/hear that lets investigate. I spent alot of time navigating the woods at night when it was pitch black with him, so sight is an afterthought to me and mostly a crutch or burden. I try to cater to the other senses with my art, or at least get an involuntary reaction from them.
Reading these, I was taken back to a concert i had watched over the summer. It was the Philadelphia singers, backed by a full orchestra, performing pieces by Philip Glass and Steven Reich. The music was rich and orderly, and the sound resonated throughout the concert hall and my entire body. A few of the scores played out difficult time signatures that i could barely follow, yet they gave me goose-bumps nonetheless. These structures of sound production were no-doubt written out in standard notation for the ease of the musicians to reproduce what the composer had intended. And now I think about these graphic scores, such as the ones Anthony Braxton was producing. And I think of some of the recorded performances of these pieces i had investigated. These pieces have no affect on me at all. The random squabble of various instruments, molested individually by some musicians, to me is not interesting. Neither are the visuals of the score. It is an exploration in music that I see being just as necessary as Jackson Pollack deciding to fling house paint onto a large piece of cloth, but alas, my days of romance with these former generation's progressive impulses are over. For me, there is a very specific structure music has to follow to be successful in affecting my mind and body. Abstract expressionist music does not do this.
Both of these readings really delve into the actual experience of sound in not only the physical world, but in the mental. Brewster's writing I found to be more translatable to my practice of sculpture, commenting on the union of sound and the practice of 'sculpture' as itself. "Sculpture should be a category of EXPERIENCE, not just a category of physical objects for us to stand back and behold." I find this extremely interesting considering I've been grappling with that concept myself; I personally don't like the practice of making objects or artifacts, but rather want to push the audience into a completely different area of existence through an environment. Sound is only one facet that can help me envelop the viewer, turn them into something less-distanced, and more involved.
ReplyDeleteMcLuhan's article discussed the interesting development of the senses in different cultures over time, calling to attention the favoring of sight over anything else. Sight seems to place us at a distance of the world around us, casting us as viewers instead of actual players. Sound has the power to break that barrier, having no boundaries in space but rather all-encompassing the body. Albeit McLuhan believes that modern Americans have produced sight over-stimulation, I believe that we are fast transgressing into that of both sight and sound overload, with music becoming such an accessible and central commodity to most lives. It keeps the brain occupied through constant auditory stimulation, relieving the need to mentally focus on thoughts or other senses while in silence. While more ways of creating experience through the senses are being developed, I'm not sure if 'over-stimulation' of any one sense is necessarily a bad thing; it should be up to the individual how they want to experience when given the option. But I agree that sound is something that should be given more credit when moving through the world; it creates such a different bend on an experience when all facets of the environment are taken into consideration.
-Brianna Didyoung
As talked about in a previous article, advancement does not instantly equal “good.” In the case of CD players, for example, the more “advanced,” technologically modern products made sound manipulation more difficult and therefore became less valuable to sound artists. What I find fascinating, however, is that the disadvantages of modern products do not end there; in fact, they continue on to us. McLuhan concluded that modern society disadvantaged “hearers” of today due to the fact that they are so trained to pick up visual, and only visual, cues. To me, this makes great sense as I often find myself struggling to hear and find art in noise. It is something that an individual needs to retrain back into him or herself after an upbringing in which society has trained it out.
ReplyDelete--Tiffany
I don't know how much I agree with the statement on page 102, where it claims that "it is difficult to see a sculpture fully" with the reasoning behind this statement being that "it's always a bunch of sequenced frontalizations." I believe that a good sculpture addresses something which penetrates the brain in places which are not categorized by "seeing" or "hearing," specifically. The conceptual integrity of a sculpture, no matter which form it takes, becomes something that can only be recognized by the viewer. It is the intangible affect on the viewer, based on past memories or ideas or visions specific to that person's personal historical knowledge that must be addressed and stimulated; things must be decided and described only within the mind of one person. There are things that a purely visual sculpture can address that a sound piece would never be able to convey or affects that could never be felt without the contextual physical representation of the idea. Even the same idea or emotive reaction is desired, there is a specific need for which medium is chosen. Within this aspect, there lies another embedded and unappreciated art. I completely disagree with the notion that sculptures are "just a category of physical objects for us to just stand back and behold." This may be true for objects or daily crap that we experience, but the same can be said about background noise. I feel that you can experience a physical representation of a sculpture in a different, but just as strong/heavy/emotive/experiential manner as with a sound piece.
ReplyDeleteAgain, in the third paragraph on page 102, I see the author discrediting the power and importance of the viewers inner reaction. It all goes along with what I just said about personal memories contributing and essentially making up the entire sculpture. When considering a "seen" sculpture, the immediacy and importance of the conceptual intentions are not directly penetrating and stimulating your brain as with soundwaves--I acknowledge that at times a sound piece can feel as if it were coming from WITHIN your own brain and being permanently contained there forever--but it can do something that is powerful based on the movement/flow/STUN and HALT of the thought-process; acknowledging subconscious feelings or bringing forth dissimilar and unintended connections that each person will experience differently.
The desire to "wrap [the experience] around the viewer" is understandable, but what about the restrictions that a sound piece then brings up? Headphones only have so long of a cord, losing that restriction lends itself to interference from shuffling of unintended noises or not experiencing the reverberation or intensity of the piece if using speakers, etc. Brewster seems to be making points that are generalizing "seen" sculptures as being incompetent and "heard" sculptures as being the flawless way to experience a sculpture. I, personally, believe that a sound piece can hold my attention for nowhere near as much time as I could tolerate breathing in water. When I am forced to analyze or critique or explore a given track, I do so, but I don't look back on it in the same way I do with a pictorial, stored image of a "seen" sculpture. Along with each image that falls easily into the way in which my brain deals with categorization comes my thought process and memories of blips of thoughts/concepts/previous memories/sensations/all of it. With a sound piece, it may penetrate closer to the mind, but it seems to have no importance past that into the filing and long-term memory section for re-visiting and connecting it to bigger things.
When he says that sound is "a spacious thing that you can inhabit," I found myself shaking my head. I see sound as inhabiting YOU. Within your brain, reacting to your ears. It is an intangible and impenetrable sensation at its best.
Steph Hedges
Thinking in the way McLuhan presents it, sound is "rarely limited by the density of physical objects." This is an intense notion that is a supporting fact to his previous statement; the acknowledging that "if our eardrums were tuned any higher we would hear molecules colliding in the air and the roaring rush of our own blood." These concepts are so unimaginable just because we have accepted what we can and cannot hear.
ReplyDeleteThe way McLuhan analyzes the dependency on the brain to analyze what the eye can see it actually a factual support as to what Brewster was talking about. I still don't buy it, though. Yes, I understand and respect Mc's description of how the middleground gets lost and the boundaries of seeing are fixed, I just don't see it as an inferior means of conveying the same deep-down feeling of things that acoustic space can occupy/achieve. It's also interesting to think about humans only being capable of auditory sensations (before the construction of words and numbers).
ALSO, I'm in the sound development room at the Tech Center and there are 4 other people in here, all music majors, I assume, because they're tapping on the table and recording music using the keyboards with headphones in, but to me it just sounds like the tap/bang/click of the plastic keys slamming back into place. It's driving me insane and making my heart rush. I've been focusing on them as my internalized understandings of the intentional aspects surrounding emotive reactions to sounds. So instead of being pissed and perturbed by these jerks, I'm thinking about how the conceptual aspects of sound art translate into daily life. I see the connection between what these artists are consciously point out as a piece of artwork and what someone unknowingly emits into the realm of sound, left to be ignored or interpreted by anyone blessed/cursed to be within earshot of the soundwaves that have been created. Almost everything we do becomes noise pollution and it ignites some sort of sensation to those around us who hear it; whether it's consciously analyzed like I'm doing right now or it slips into our subconscious and we don't recognize the fact that we recognize it, but some part of us does. It then formulates memories and connotative reactions specific to one person only and stores them away for the next thing that only that one person would ever be capable of relating to a completely unrelated ideas or sounds or imagery, what-have-you.
Steph Hedges.
"Sculpture should be a category of experience" - YES. I think I love this article. I agree that sculpture is the perfect medium in which to use sound as art. Sound is the only thing that I can think of that can exist as an object without actually being there. There is so much dimension and personality to sound that it is easy to personify and apply emotion to sound. By using sculpture as the vessel for sound art, we are simply giving an actual body to an otherwise bodiless entity. I agree that sound helps to close the gap between the "perceived and perceiver". It bridges the gap between something we can feel and something we can see.
ReplyDelete-CAITLYN
I thought it was interesting that in McLuhan's essay, he speaks (or writes, I guess I should make that distiction) of the effects of written language but his points on sound focus on hearing rather than the foibles of spoken language (intonation, affect, etc.) I supposed that's touched on a bit in the mentioning of Goebbels' loudspeakers (a commanding live presence wins followers in a way that a book or article couldn't). There's also a lot of discussion in the article about how people use their own language, such as the distiction McLuhan makes between Westerners and the Trobrianders conceptions of time. These are all interesting, but I would like to hear (or read..or hear...damn) some thoughts on the differences between written and spoken works.
ReplyDelete- Tom
The view of vision being a limiting sense expressed in both of these articles is one that I too have found to be true of life and the arts. (I have cited it as being one of the reasons that I chose sculpture as my preferred medium). I grew up in a house where we were encouraged to use all of our other senses as much as sight. My dad and I have hyper-sensitive olfactory gifts, and it was way more common growing up to talk about subtle sounds or smells than it was to say: Hey! Did you see that? Lets investigate!. It was hey did you smell/hear that lets investigate. I spent alot of time navigating the woods at night when it was pitch black with him, so sight is an afterthought to me and mostly a crutch or burden. I try to cater to the other senses with my art, or at least get an involuntary reaction from them.
ReplyDeleteReading these, I was taken back to a concert i had watched over the summer. It was the Philadelphia singers, backed by a full orchestra, performing pieces by Philip Glass and Steven Reich. The music was rich and orderly, and the sound resonated throughout the concert hall and my entire body. A few of the scores played out difficult time signatures that i could barely follow, yet they gave me goose-bumps nonetheless. These structures of sound production were no-doubt written out in standard notation for the ease of the musicians to reproduce what the composer had intended. And now I think about these graphic scores, such as the ones Anthony Braxton was producing. And I think of some of the recorded performances of these pieces i had investigated. These pieces have no affect on me at all. The random squabble of various instruments, molested individually by some musicians, to me is not interesting. Neither are the visuals of the score. It is an exploration in music that I see being just as necessary as Jackson Pollack deciding to fling house paint onto a large piece of cloth, but alas, my days of romance with these former generation's progressive impulses are over. For me, there is a very specific structure music has to follow to be successful in affecting my mind and body. Abstract expressionist music does not do this.
ReplyDelete--PHLADKY